


when i die, you'll be my forever

by xiryna



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Hanahaki Disease, M/M, Team as Family, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-11
Updated: 2019-10-11
Packaged: 2020-12-07 20:50:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20982182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xiryna/pseuds/xiryna
Summary: Isn’t it ironic, he thinks? The flowers that give us our oxygen are the same as the ones that steal your last breath away. As if asking back what they’ve given. As if entitled to the oxygen in your lungs and in your blood, as they unfurl and bloom in places they’re not meant to be, as your love unfurls and blooms in places it’s not meant to be.





	when i die, you'll be my forever

**Author's Note:**

> Another Google Drive oneshot collecting dust that I might as well share since it's survived this long. I remember writing this in the middle of the night and just needing to get the words out. I think I like writing like that the most, the ones that already exist and just need an intermediary to get on the page, the ones that are already written somewhere, somehow, and you don't even know it until you've started and once you've stopped.

Lance firsts experiences it as a tickling at the back of his throat. Cloying and nagging, like something that hasn’t been properly swallowed down. Like mucus and phlegm coating his insides.

At first, it’s bearable. Annoying, but bearable. Appearing in bouts and subsiding shortly afterwards. His first instinct is to cough it up, but tuition has him swallowing it down. He doesn’t know why. Doesn’t really think of it, to be honest. A split-second decision that bore no meaning, no value. 

The weeks pass of course. Movie nights with centuries-old Altean movies and Coran and Allura talking over the audio so much that it's a good thing there are subtitles. Battles in space trailing explosions along the night sky whose vibrations he can feel but can’t hear. Regular training sessions that leave everyone exhausted but proud, tired but content; a sweet, savoury sort of satisfaction that complements the bitter ache of acid that pulls and burns at their muscles. Scouting missions turned camping trips, and casual sing-alongs at night accompanied by the chords from the guitar Lance had found during one of their diplomatic negotiations, at some old, tucked-away knickknack shop on some old, tucked-away planet. All through it, he feels it, tickling and cloying and nagging. A promise, of sorts, of things to come. 

It happened soon enough. They had landed at a rather small, otherwise unoccupied planet. The trenches that littered the icy surface reached deep through the mantle, and in result the place seemed from above to be spider-webbed with the muted red glow of heat that seemed to emanate from the core and make itself known along the depths of the ruts in the earth. Coran and Allura had left them be early on, and it was just the five of them at the observation deck, alternating between mindlessly staring at Allura’s hologram stars and gazing at the real ones, easily sharing stories from back home and secrets there was no point to keeping secret anymore. They slipped uncontrolled from their lips as if they were pearls and diamonds and all of them were characters from some French fairytale, fortunate and fairy-blessed. The five of them all talked the night away until they were cradled in the stuff of dreams, sprawled across each other in some way or another and limbs tangled, laying on a floor littered with diamonds and scattered with pearls - enough that if they were literal, they’d be swimming in them like Alice floating amongst her tears.

It was only an hour later that Lance woke to something nestled in the crevices of his mouth. It tickled, and overflowed. And when he gagged and hacked it up into the cup of his hands,

they were not pearls,

they were not diamonds.

They were flower petals, crushed velvet and bruised, waxy white and glistening in more ways than one. 

Lance short circuits, and his mind draws a blank, the way that only shock and incredulity can bring forth in a person. The world sucks in a breath at its own surrealism, and in this curious standstill, in this curiously still moment, as if suspended in free-fall, Lance can only stare wide-eyed. And when he blinks, the world is again set in breathtaking motion: a montage of flashbacks and snapshots that replay in fast-forward on the backs of his eyelids. Dark brown curls and freckled skin and sunlight sitting broadly through the slats in the blinds.Yellow ochre tinged with dusky orange floating complacently on the water, romantic ideals betrayed only by a stilled telltale rush and wispy clouds of red that reach tendrils out and dye the bathtub walls an bile-inducing and reflex-triggering off-pink. Powerpoints and Health class readings in elementary, textured walls and construction paper and silver staples, out-of-body photos picturing two sets of lungs: one shriveled with smoke and nicotine and the other bursting with sprays of green and red and blue. Questions fired across the dining table with innocent intent and garage sales consisting primarily of a myriad of second-hand vases. Black-out crowds and hushed silence parting around tremulous hands prickly with the attention, holding the lone spot of color in an artist’s achromatic painting. Lance remembers his flushed skin and the patches of sweat staining the underarms of his dress shirt despite the chilliness of the autumn air. He thinks he might have felt sorry for the guy, but he couldn’t bring himself to be when he saw the flowers in clutched tight in his palm. 

And when the world finally fades to some semblance of normalcy, Lance laughs - a hoarse, gritty thing. He deliriously strings letters together to form a name that desperately needs unscrambling, and chances a glance at its owner. Glancing between the petals cupped in his palms and the earnestly sleeping form only two feet across the room, Lance dares think they suit him; if anything, white against red had always made for something dignified, something valiant, something noble.

Lance remembers hating marigolds, sometime forever ago. 

But now that it’s him that’s been copied and pasted into this same wretched narrative, all he finds himself wondering is if Keith likes magnolias.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading. :)  
\- Magnolia = perseverance, nobility, dignity, splendid beauty


End file.
